I love Istanbul! I have discovered it in 2007 and last week it was my third visit to this colourful city.
Istanbul is a city of lots of things, beside the cultural differences, at any corner you will find:
- Cats(the land of cats, because Turkish people do love them)
- Merchandise of any kind(I mean it - you can brake your hill and there in the corner there are shoes for sale)
- Kebap(delicious)
- Turkish delight(heaven)
- Spices(crazy strong smell)
- Whatever famous Designer Bag you want(copy of it of course:))
- At one single corner there is the Grand bazaar
This time my trip was about shopping and less visiting.
I shopped a lot because is one of the things I do best. You will see in a future post e few of my purchase.
We got there during Ramadan, which is like Christmas for us, but it last for a month and it is more about self, god and family.
I shopped at two shopping malls - Nautilus in the Asian side and Forum Istanbul in the European side. For Nautilus we took the Marmaray subway train which travels under Bosphorus Strait. I saw there the largest escalators and there were 5 of them until the actual station.
Istiklal Caddesi is a very European like shopping street that has a very nice red tram that rides in the middle of the street.
The Grand Bazaar is there since 1461 and is simply amazing. It is like a huge maze with painted arcades and shops full of gold and traditional lamps, hookah, pots, leather jackets and bags.
Thanks to Ramadan we did a little bit of shopping in a traditional street market.
About the touristic side of this trip I visited a very interesting place called Basilica Cistern and I went on a cruise on Bosphorus.
This is a city that you must see, with it's cultural differences, steep streets, and I think the largest market place in Europe, Istanbul is the oriental bridge between Europe and Asia.
You can see in this post the cats&dogs I spotted in Istanbul.
